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Dr Josue Saenz of Mexico was elected, without objection, to fill the vacancy for the unexpired term of Dr Martinez Cabanas, and this action of the Committee was approved by the General Assembly. Proposals for the Adoption of Russian and Chinese as Working Languages of the Assembly At the earlier part of the third session the General Assembly decided that Spanish should be adopted as a working language in addition to French and English, which had been used as working languages since the establishment of the Organization. At that time the Soviet Union and China respectively proposed that Russian and Chinese (the remaining two of the five official languages) should also be adopted as working languages, but it was not till the second part of the session that the proposals were discussed. Meanwhile both the Secretary-General and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions had prepared reports on the subject. The former came to the conclusion that the adoption of these proposals would involve for a full year of operation an additional cost of approximately $1,700,000 and that an increase in the number of working languages would, apart from any consideration of expense, seriously hamper the general efficiency of the Secretariat. The Advisory Committee, while considering that the estimated cost alone could be reduced by at least $500,000, stated that in its opinion no new factors had arisen either from the administrative or financial standpoint which would warrant its making a different recommendation from that given in its report on the adoption of Spanish as a working language —namely, that for reasons of financial stringency in particular it would not be advisable to impose upon the members the additional burden proposed. In the course of the general discussion the supporters of both proposals reiterated the arguments advanced in favour of the adoption of Spanish as a working language. It was firstly claimed by the supporters of the adoption of Russian and Chinese that if the Committee did not give the same status to these two languages as had at the earlier part of the session been given to Spanish, this action could not fail to be interpreted as an act of discrimination not merely against these two remaining official languages, but also against the millions of people who spoke them. The number of people speaking and understanding the two languages was four times larger than the number speaking and understanding Spanish, and it was therefore imperative that all current documentation should be made available in these languages in order that the Chinese and Russian peoples should increase their knowledge of the United Nations. Furthermore, both these peoples had made major contributions in the war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan ; and by-their efforts had made the establishment of the United

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